"We're too close together," she protested.
"Don't stir," said I. "Do you feel how it wabbles?"
She tested the camp-stool cautiously, and nodded.
"What an absurd situation," she remarked, glancing up at the gamp which I held over us.
"I think it's very jolly." She didn't look at me; we were too close—so close that we might possibly have rubbed noses if either turned. But in her side-long glance I noted both amusement and irony.
"Have you caught anything, Don Michael?"
"Not a bally thing."
"What are you reading?"
"A book of sorts—a novel by an 'author' who lacks education, cultivation, experience, vocabulary, and a working knowledge of English grammar. In other words, Thusis, a typical American 'author,'—one of the Bolsheviki of literature whose unlettered Bolshevik readers are recruited from the same audience that understands and roars with laughter at the German and Jewish jokes which compose the librettos of our New York musical comedies."
Thusis turned up her pretty nose and shrugged—or tried to,—but nearly upset me, and desisted.